Residents recall Ohio village's black community

AULTMAN, Ohio (AP) -- In the northernmost tip of Stark County, Lake Township is bustling with new houses and industry. A thriving Akron-Canton Airport sits just over the border in Summit County.

No one ever would guess that decades ago, within a tiny village just northeast of the airport, was an all-black enclave where people lived in round houses made of tile.

The story of Aultman, Ohio, has been a passion for Geraldine "Gerry" Radcliffe, a retired nurse who has been researching the history of Aultman and its residents for nearly 15 years.

"When I was 12, my dad took us out to Aultman," she recalled. "The people lived in round houses. I thought 'Wow, this is really cool.'"

Most residents of Aultman worked for the National Fireproofing Co. or NATCO, which provided free housing for its employees.

Radcliffe said she is unsure when Aultman was founded, but she speculates that it was established on land owned by the Aultmans, the wealthy farm industrialists and the namesake family of Canton's Aultman Hospital.

The Tile & Conduit Works was founded in Aultman in the 1880s to produce clay conduit blocks for underground telephone lines. Aultman initially was occupied mostly by German immigrants who worked there. The company eventually was purchased by National Fireproofing, which changed its name to NATCO in 1956.

"I started inquiring where the people went, and why no one was talking about it," said Radcliffe, who gives PowerPoint presentations on Aultman. "At one time, 1,000 people lived there. People started bringing me stuff after they knew I was interested."

Bobbie Howard said she was 9 when her parents moved the family to Aultman from tiny Bartow, Ga.

"My dad's cousin had gone to Akron, from Georgia," she recalled. "They were hiring in Aultman at the brickyard. My father's cousin was rooming with a guy who had job there, so he got my father a job. That's how we got to Aultman."

Howard said that upon their arrival, they lived temporarily with another family but eventually got their own home.

"We lived in two different round houses," she said.

Howard said she left Aultman at 19 when she got married and moved to Orrville.

Because of the region's abundance of clay, Stark County became a mecca for brick-making in the 1880s. According to the Ohio Historical Society and E.T. Heald's "The Stark County Story," 41 brick companies existed between 1882 and 1901. Hollow block, which was first made locally at the Waynesburg Brick and Clay Co., grew in popularity for wall tile, and construction and fireproofing projects. It was purchased in 1896 by National Fireproofing, which grew to 23 plants in the U.S, including seven in Stark County, and three in Canada.

By the early part of the 20th century, blacks who worked in the brick-making industry in the South, particularly in Kentucky and Tennessee, were being recruited to come north.

Those who did were part of the "Great Migration," when an estimated 6 million blacks left the rural and segregated South for economic opportunity and a little less segregation in the industrial North.

Aultman made national news among black media outlets, including a story published in the Pittsburgh Courier on May 22, 1926. The brief story, which examines job opportunities for black workers in the Canton area, also mentions Waynesburg, Magnolia and Mineral City.

Such articles would have been a driver for a couple such as Arthur and Elizabeth High, who wanted to do better by their seven children. Their daughter, Emmaline High Turpin, remembers the family's move from Raleigh, N.C., to Ohio in 1926.

"We landed in Malvern," she said. "Daddy worked at Robinson Clay, which made sewer pipes. Then we moved to Waynesburg. Daddy got a job at Aultman in 1929, and we ended up moving there."

Turpin, 95, said her family of nine didn't live in a round house, but she recalls with astonishment that the homes had concrete upper floors. There was no electricity or indoor bathrooms. Water came from a community pump. Most of the women were homemakers.

"Some people raised vegetables, chickens, pigs and guinea hens," she recalled. "There's no days like that now. Money's the most important thing in the world, today. But money don't bring happiness."

Virtually the entire town attended services at the First Baptist Church of Aultman -- a tiny, white clapboard structure lit by oil lamps and warmed by a potbellied stove, and where Radcliffe's uncle, the Rev. John L. King, was a pastor.

Everyone put on their Sunday best -- men in suits, women in hats and gloves.

"We dressed up," Turpin said. "People would ask us, 'Why are you dressed up like you're going somewhere?' But we were going somewhere."

Dean Prophet was a toddler when his parents left Aultman. His parents, he said, came to Aultman from Birmingham, Ala., around 1930.

"As for stories, they never really said too much about it," he said. "As I got older, I did go back, but everything was leveled."

Prophet remembers that his older siblings attended Greentown High School. In later years, some Aultman teens attended Hoover High School in North Canton.

"A lot of the residents were immigrants, so I don't think there was so much prejudice," Prophet said. "They were minorities, too."

"We were treated well," Turpin recalled. "Greentown residents were very friendly. If they saw an Aultman resident in another part of town, they'd speak to you. Not like some people."

Turpin dropped out of school at 17 in 1935 to get married. Her late husband, Isaac, was a mechanic who didn't want to work in the plant. Instead, he found work at Harpold Motors in North Canton.

Silver Barbosa Thompson and her two younger siblings lived in Aultman from infancy. Their father, Tony, a Portuguese immigrant from Cape Verde Island, came to Stark County by way of Carlisle, Pa.

Their mother died when Silver was 10.

"He worked at Republic Steel in Canton," she said. "A job opened up at the brickyard. We didn't live in a round house, but my grandmother did."

Thompson said most of the round houses had cement floors.

"There was one big room downstairs, and a set of stairs, and one big room upstairs, she said. "Most people divided the rooms up."

Henry Mack said members of his family were recruited from Kentucky.

"I still have three lanterns they used to use," he said.

Mack said his late father, Henry Sr., worked at NATCO for a time, before he got married and moved to Canton.

Mack said his dad would return to visit Aultman.

"He had some cousins still out there, so every now and then, we'd go out there to see them," he said. "I used to chase lightning bugs. You couldn't see 2 feet in front of your face, it was so dark."

Don Henkel, 82, also has vivid memories of Aultman.

"I grew up in Aultman," he said. "They (NATCO) had shops in Magnolia, East Canton and Minerva," he said. "A lot of black people did work at all of those plants."

Henkel said his grandfather was a plant foreman in Aultman at the turn of the century, and that he himself worked there as a water boy there during the summer of 1947, to help care for his widowed mother.

In its heyday, he said, the plant at Aultman was 3 miles long.

"Western Electric was a major customer," Henkel said. "Some of those clay conduits were huge. I could never figure how people could lift them. I could barely move one. They (workers) were exceptionally strong, but some of them died young."

Henkel, 82, went on to have a career in the brick industry for 44 years, primarily as a salesman in suburban Detroit, where he currently resides.

In the 1960s, NATCO was purchased by Fuqua Industries of Atlanta, but the plant met its demise when concrete conduits became easier and cheaper to make. After workers went on strike in 1964, it went bankrupt.

Radcliffe has devoted hours of her time and money researching Aultman because she believes it's an important part of local history, and black history.

"I believe the people who lived and worked out there made such a contribution to the community," she said.

Last year, she found Aultman's train station, which was disassembled in 1975 following a fire, and reconstructed in Dresden, Ohio. The Wheeling, Lake Erie & Valley railroad ran through the center of the village, from Akron.

After they married, the Turpins built a bungalow on Mayfield Road, where Emmaline lived until she moved to Canton. But the city would hold its own sorrows. Their only son, Isaac Jr., a former Marine, died on Oct. 6, 1979, following a dispute in a downtown nightclub. Her mother died on the same day.

"Riding down I-77 these days, you almost cry when you think of the memories," she said. "We didn't have a whole lot of money, but we had a good time."

"We were all family; everybody was friendly and close-knit," Thompson said. "Everybody knew everybody. We went to everybody's house."

Turpin added that Aultman residents were more than neighbors and co-workers; they were a family. They made their own fun, which included tin-tub fish fries and homemade ice cream.

"You pooled your money," she recalled with a smile. "We came through some hard times, but you come to appreciate it. It teaches you a lot of things. I think when you come up like that, you learn what's important."

Henkel said he has a theory of why some of the houses in Aultman were round. NATCO, he said, produced round tiles for grain silos that contained a "salt glaze," making them waterproof.

"I think that just because they had the material, it was easy to build," he said. "I used to sell the silo tile; it was a pretty good product. It's impervious to water."

The homes were demolished after NATCO went bankrupt.

"People stayed friends, even after they left Aultman," Turpin recalled. "Those were the good old days, and we didn't know it."